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Craig McInnes: Climate change brings new meaning to work ethic

Traffic on the northbound and southbound lanes of the 110 Harbor Freeway starts to stack up during rush hour traffic on February 5, 2013 in Los Angeles, Calif. An average commuter spent 61 hours delayed in traffic during 2011. The cost of the wasted time and gas is about $1,300 per commuter.

Photograph by: Kevork Djansezian
, Getty Images

Among the promises of the future along with flying cars when I was growing up in the ’60s was that technology would enable a life of leisure for ordinary folk.

We’d work two days and rest seven while machines tilled the soil, ran the factories, built the houses and cleaned them.

For most of us, that life of leisure hasn’t panned out. Not only are we working just as much or more now, the dream of an early retirement is being eroded by some form of Freedom 85. The benefits from mechanization have led to lower prices for food and electronics, but instead of spending less, we’re buying more stuff and paying for more services.

This month, a paper published by an economist at the Washington, D.C. based Center for Economic and Policy Research argued that the old goal of working less should be revived, but with a new motivation – climate change.

David Rosnick makes what seems like an obvious argument to me, which is that less work would mean less money to buy stuff with and lead to less consumption. The stuff being consumed then wouldn’t be produced and all of the energy and materials that go into those products wouldn’t be needed and, voila, less climate-change inducing gases would be released into the atmosphere.

Sensible though that seems, as even the author notes, like the futuristic vision of a life of leisure, it’s a path not likely to be taken because we don’t have the kind of society where the benefits of productivity increases are equally shared.

The people who work some of the longest hours are also among the least able to cut back because they are already struggling to make ends meet. We don’t live in a Utopian world, nor are we ever likely to.

So contemplating whether we can slow climate change by reducing the hours of work doesn’t seem to me to be on its own very useful. What intrigued me about the paper, however, is that it reinforced a potentially more useful piece of the climate change equation that I rarely hear discussed.

What is rarely considered is the role that cost to consumers plays when so-called green solutions are promoted. Cost is usually only talked about in the context of whether consumers are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly goods and services. What isn’t factored in is the question of whether a higher cost by itself should be considered when deciding whether something is truly green.

Take electric cars for example. They are still a bit rare, partly because of the cost. A gas-powered car that provides the same utility as a small electric car can be purchased for $15,000 to $20,000 less. What most people look at when they compare the cost of the two is whether the lower cost of operating the electric car will eventually make it worth the higher purchase price.

But what is the environmental cost of the money itself? Most of us have to earn the dollars we would be investing in the volt-guzzler. So we would be buying the car with after-tax dollars. That means to come up with an extra $20,000 to spend on a car, we would probably have to earn an extra $25,000 to $28,000, depending on our tax bracket.

To earn that money, we have to go to work. Working takes energy, whether we are office workers or driving a garbage truck. We have to buy work clothes and commute to work. Our offices are heated or air-conditioned. We have furniture and computers and lights. We need roads and bridges and buses and trains to get around.

The more we work, the more energy we consume while working. The more stuff we buy, the more we have to work. The more expensive that stuff is, the more we have to work.

So if I buy a gasoline-powered car instead of an electric car and I am able to work for three months less, what is that worth on the green scale?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s a question worth pursuing.

One thing that seems clear is that climate change makes the whole equation a lot more complicated. But if it leads to a future where we all get to work less, maybe that’s a good thing.

Traffic on the northbound and southbound lanes of the 110 Harbor Freeway starts to stack up during rush hour traffic on February 5, 2013 in Los Angeles, Calif. An average commuter spent 61 hours delayed in traffic during 2011. The cost of the wasted time and gas is about $1,300 per commuter.

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